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Bruce Levenson racism stir not Donald Sterling sequel: Arthur

Mark Cuban saw it coming. The owner of the Dallas Mavericks is unafraid of saying certain things out loud, and he’s sharp. And as the NBA ran Clippers owner Donald Sterling out of the league for being a demonstrable racist, to great acclaim, Cuban was the only owner to publicly raise an alarm.

“How many people are bigoted in one way or the other in this league?” Cuban said to reporters in April. “I don’t know. But you find one, all of a sudden you say well, you can’t play favourites being racist against African-Americans. Where do you draw the line?”

Sunday the NBA revealed that Atlanta’s Bruce Levenson would voluntarily sell the Atlanta Hawks after a 2012 email full of thoughts about race. Levenson said he co-operated; the league said he self-reported the email. Murkier reasons may be lurking, but this appears to be a bloodless coup.

It wasn’t Donald Sterling, though. Yes, Levenson made sweeping generalizations about his fan base, saying that many “black fans don’t have the spendable income,” while pointing to the white fan base of the Atlanta Thrashers and their superior merchandise sales, for all the good it did them.

He admitted, “I have also balked when every fan picked out of crowd to shoot shots in some time out contest is black. I have even bitched that the kiss cam is too black.” He said he thought black fans cheered less. He wanted white cheerleaders, and music for 40-year-old white guys.

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But Levenson’s worry that the “black crowd scares away the whites” was based on his feeling that “southern whites simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority.” He derided those southern white fears, while recognizing them. He sounded a lot like a businessman dealing with market realities, while also painting those realities with a broad, insensitive brush.

Rolling U.S. census data from 2009-12 showed white households in the city of Atlanta with an estimated mean income of $80,353, versus $26,351 for blacks. A Harvard/Cal Berkeley joint study last year on upward mobility found Atlanta near the bottom of major cities, behind Detroit.

The Hawks are a perennial bottom-tier attendance franchise. Levenson will still sell them for over half a billion dollars. Sterling did say he was going to expose the secrets of his fellow owners, as he fell. Hmm.

But to be ejected from the NBA for this? In 2005, after the Malice at the Palace brawl, the league hired George W. Bush pollster Matthew Dowd to help reconnect the league’s fans (largely white) to its players (largely black) after focus groups reportedly saw too many players as “thugs.” Before he was commissioner, David Stern was told by newspaper columnists that America would always see the NBA as “too black.”

The NBA has had to walk this electrified third rail for decades. All Bruce Levenson did was put the sell job in broad, brutish terms, without speaking in code. In Atlanta the Braves are moving to a new stadium. As The Associated Press put it in November, “(the Braves) will be moving from an area that’s predominantly black and relatively poor compared to whiter Cobb County — where the team says more ticket-buyers live.”

How is that different? It’s calculating based on both class and race, to maximize your money. You can bet every sports franchise does extensive market research. Bruce Levenson was just unfiltered enough to put the ideas in an email.

But Adam Silver’s NBA is pushing him out, and other owners are surely employing very thorough and professional people to sanitize and destroy any lasting ideas that could come back to offend.

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Because now owners are subject to this different standard, and who knows what else is lurking up there, in the clouds? You could reasonably argue that there has never been a truly bad time to be a billionaire with racist leanings, or at least the propensity to say what’s really on your mind, because the arc of justice rarely reached that high. Until, apparently, today’s NBA.

So, some nervousness. As Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported, there was far less support among owners for Silver’s banishment of Sterling than was made public, when they announced a unanimous vote. Of course there wasn’t. As Cuban said back then, “What Donald said was wrong. It was abhorrent. There’s no place for racism in the NBA, any business I’m associated with. But . . . I think you’ve got to be very, very careful when you start making blanket statements about what people say and think, as opposed to what they do. It’s a very, very slippery slope.”

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